Intel Will Ship First Neural Network Chip This Year

In an editorial posted on Intel's news site, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced they would be releasing the company's first AI processor before the end of 2017. The new chip, formally codenamed "Lake Crest," will be officially known as the Nervana Neural Network Processor, or NNP, for short. As implied by its name, the chip will use technology from Nervana, an AI startup Intel acquired for more than $350 million last year. Unlike GPUs or FPGAs, NNP is a custom-built coprocessor aimed specifically at deep learning, that is, processing the neural networks upon which these applications are based. In that sense, Intel's NNP is much like Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a custom-built chip the search giant developed to handle much its own deep learning work.